Does This Study Make Me Look Fat?

By Christopher Shea

A new study suggests that, for maximal marital happiness, the husband’s body-mass index, or BMI, ought to be greater than the wife’s.

The study, forthcoming in Social Psychological and Personality Science, checked in with 165 newlywed couples every six months for four years, using two different measures of conjugal bliss (different types of questionnaires, basically). Somewhat depressingly, happiness steadily declined over the course of the study for couples of every size ratio. But men who had a higher BMI than their wives were slightly happier at the outset of the study than those who had the same or a lower BMI, and they maintained that advantage over their male peers throughout. (The study controlled for numerous other factors relating to happiness, including income, education, and depressive symptoms.)

In the case of women, the male-female BMI ratio didn’t play a role in happiness early on. But by the end of year four, the wives whose BMI was lower than that of their husbands were significantly more happy than those who had the same BMI, or a higher one, than their husbands. That last group faced the steepest drop in happiness.

Is there a whiff of societal sexism here, an insistence on thinness as an ideal? That’s one way to look at it. But the authors play up the fact that BMI ratios are a strictly relative measure. Thinness per se has nothing to do with it. “Rather, women of any size can be happy in her relationship if she finds the right man,” they write. That is, the right-sized man.